[Ti] Powerbook MacIntel... could be, could be... what do you think?

[Chris Olson]

On Nov 18, 2005, at 4:17 AM, Mikael Byström wrote:

> You simply do not know this for a fact. You believe so. Belief is  
> not fact.

Fact:
With the billions of lines of code that have been polished on  
PowerPC, all the problems are not going to be found in the port to  
x86.  For instance, an integer divide-by-zero exception in some  
obscure subroutine results in a crash on 86, while on PowerPC the  
same operation returns zero.

The first purchasers of MacTel computers will be public beta  
testers.  And I do know that for a fact, because unless Apple changes  
their methodology, there will be no public beta testing prior to  
release.  This is being likened to the change from OS9 to OS X?   
Obviously, memories are short or you never ran 10.0.  Apple gave away  
(for free) Mac OS X 10.1 upgrades for the purpose of public beta  
testing, and the poor public reputation of 10.0.  10.0 "Cheetah" was  
slow, not feature complete, and had constant kernel panic problems  
(crashes), even though it was released into the hands of the public  
as "stable".

Releasing a new operating system version is trivial compared to  
releasing a new architecture port.  I laugh at the comparisons when  
people say this is no different that going from 68k to PPC.  Here's  
another fact: back then there wasn't much code.  Today there's  
literally billions of lines of it and Mac OS X is a complicated beast  
that takes up so much disk space that it couldn't even be *stored* on  
the supercomputers of the 68k days.

-- 
Chris

-------------------------
PGP Key:  http://astcomm.net/~chris/PGP_Public_Key/
-------------------------